patrick.net

High home prices can be attributed to the "Two Income Trap."

http://www.amazon.com/The-Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class-Parents/dp/0465090907/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1352532962&sr=8-1&keywords=two+income+trap

I think push-education should be limited to K-6. Then, students should know what they want to know more and educators should help them find answers themselves.

A robust society has people with very different perspectives. For this to happen, education must be flexible. We do not even need a lot of teachers.

Education quality is not the problem, parenting quality is in most cases.

1) Encourage at least one parent to stay home and raise the kids

Not practical since today it takes two median incomes to raise a family with any kind of financial security. Of course, if half the domestic work force dropped out of the market, wages would rise. But ever family has a strong incentive to defect, so that won't happen.

2) Dissociate school assignment from residency

Absolutely, and there's only one effective way to do that. See below.

3) Teach kids to find passions, ask questions, and get answers with help

It is impossible to teach passion. The best you can do is start a government funded project to breed nerds with supermodels. Their offspring would be beautiful and passionate about learning -- both dominate traits. I've been advocating this for decades to no avail.

4) De-emphasize higher education for all except specialized areas

Raising the bar is essential for degrees and certification to mean anything in the real world. However, doing so will not increase the education of the masses.

The real solution is...

What's wrong with the educational system and how to fix it.

This guy is a genius. He explains everything that needs to be done to end the education crisis and ensure that all people regardless of income, ethnic background, or anything else have the opportunity to maximize their educational potential.

Get rid of mindless classes and double up on Math, Science, English, and History.
Cancel everything else ! extend to 9 hrs and 11 months in a year.

Fire teachers who fail.. merit increase who succeed..

This is the Steve Jobs ideas...

thomaswong.1986 says

Fire teachers who fail.. merit increase who succeed..

And how does one evaluate the success or failure of teachers? By how well their students do? If so, then all teachers will compete for jobs at schools in which the students already succeed and the poor performing schools will get the worst teachers as no one will want to work there.

Even more importantly, as long as education relies on expensive human labor -- which is fucking retarded in the information age -- then education will be expensive and therefore scarce. It's okay that some things are scarce like gold, diamonds, yachts. But education should not be scarce, and the only way to ensure that is to eliminate the human labor that is proportional to the number of students.

thomaswong.1986 says

Get rid of mindless classes and double up on Math, Science, English, and History.

Cancel everything else ! extend to 9 hrs and 11 months in a year.

Fire teachers who fail.. merit increase who succeed..

"Mindless" classes can be vital. A society will not be robust if we start deciding what is useful and what is not.

School weeks can be shortened to 4 days and it will be just as effective. Student just need to think for themselves.

thomaswong.1986 says

This is the Steve Jobs ideas...

A dead visionary is still a dead man. :-)

Dan8267 says

But education should not be scarce, and the only way to ensure that is to eliminate the human labor that is proportional to the number of students.

I totally agree.

Education should be readily available, but I rather let students choose what they want earlier on.

We do not need millions who "know" calculus. We need a more philosophy and arts students.

5) - Allow open test for college credits.
6) - stop focusing on the value of an education to a lot of people 17-18 year olds, at a time when they no least about them selves or what they want to do when they grow up. And include that sentiment to all age groups the importance of an education. We should be asking 40 year olds, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"

Fellas, we're in the age of the internet. When I was in school, resources like the sites below, simply did not exist.

http://www.academicearth.org

http://www.khanacademy.org

Now, given that we have much of the pertinent educational content online, why are we still bickering about teachers, class sizes, etc? It seems like the focus on 'fixing' education is very 20th century, when kids should already be learning online and be done with school before coming of age.

Get rid of teacher's unions.

zzyzzx says

Get rid of teacher's unions.

Yep, but for those who can't wait for politicians to get their acts together ... homeschool your kids, using this & other content:

http://www.academicearth.org

http://www.khanacademy.org

Then, take lower cost, cc college courses for credit, then opt for this low cost British school's online program (http://www.londoninternational.ac.uk/courses/search/?solrsort=sort_title%20asc&filters=%20tid%3A557)

As a parent of school aged kids, I've given this some thought.

1) Encourage at least one parent to stay home and raise the kids
Agree, but not practical for most people without a big social shift.

2) Dissociate school assignment from residency
Sounds good in principle, but, at least with the solutions we have tried, it doesn't work out very well. (I assume you are talking about school districts, here). I think there are a lot of good things about going to school near where you live, and there tend to be a lot of bad outcomes when you make people go to a school not near where they live.

3) Teach kids to find passions, ask questions, and get answers with help
This probably has more to do with individual personality and parents/family...Schools should support/encourage this, but they aren't primary in this arena.

A few points.
1. The way schools are funded by local property taxes...it's a crazy system. At least in Denver, you pay moderate property taxes ($2400/year) to get a decent school district, or very high property taxes ( $4,000+/year) to get an excellent school district. With even one child the "high" property taxes don't come close to covering the real cost of "tuition" -- *really* the price you pay is for the more expensive house, which incidentally has somewhat higher property taxes. So good schools generate value for property owners but not for the local government which administers the schools.

2. Class size matters. Fewer teachers + technology isn't the answer...especially with young children. Class size matters and should be a priority.

3. The students you share the class with are probably the most important factor. Funding, teachers, class size etc are (I think) less important than the students. Good students are a scarce resource.

Our children go to a fantastic school. It's a rich, white, mostly clueless school...but there are involved parents, bright, well behaved kids, and motivated teachers. Government funding is down, so the parents pick up the tab (about $800/student is generated through parent fundraising efforts). The extra $ goes to pay for extra curricular activities, assistants in most classrooms, technology, etc. In short, what every other kid in every other school deserves but doesn't get.

I don't think you can buy your way out of the problem (as I said, I think the quality of the students is probably the biggest factor), but I do think it makes sense to properly fund all schools, and if any schools need to "go without" it should be the ones in rich areas. If that means raising taxes in rich areas to ship off the money to poor schools, I'm in favor.

Educators need to be paid more *and* subjected to more rigorous standards. I'd like to be a high school teacher, and I may even be a good one, but I'd have to take a 75% pay cut to do it. Maybe later when I'm rich...

/rant